Being my first time spending year round in the northern hemisphere, I am able to notice every detail of each season. Now starting fall, there’s a moment where the daylight noticeably shortens and a familiar dread creeps in. It’s the call to embrace the raw winter of The Last Frontier. It’s not really about the cold — up here we have to get used to that. It’s the dark. Weeks where the sun barely clears the horizon before it’s gone again, and the whole day starts to feel like a narrow window you have to rush through.
I have been told that the approach to Alaska winter was to survive it — grit through until spring, treat the dark months as an obstacle standing between me and the parts of the year I actually liked. That approach works, technically. It also makes five months of your life feel like waiting.
Fighting the Season Doesn’t Work
Wishing the season away doesn’t make it move faster, and it robs the winter of anything worth having. In Alaska, The Last Frontier, to embrace it’s winter, value its own texture — the particular blue quality of light at midday, the sound of snow underfoot, the stillness of a town in the hours before anyone else is awake. None of that is available to you if your only goal is to get through it.
What Shifted Things
The change wasn’t dramatic. It was mostly about adjusting expectations to match the season instead of fighting it.
- Cycles are part of a normal healthy life. In summer, a good day might mean a full hike. In deep winter, it might mean getting outside for fifteen minutes at midday when the light is best. Both count. Especially as women we start to understand our bodies better when we understand how related they are to the cycles of nature.
- Build a light-chasing habit. Whatever daylight exists, use it deliberately — a short walk, sitting by a window, anything that puts you in it rather than working through it indoors.
- Let some things go dormant. Not every season needs to be equally productive. Winter can be a slower, quieter chapter without that being a failure. And it was meant to be like that, as we have the opportunity of going inwards and recovering ourselves from the inside.
- Mark small transitions. Solstice, the first noticeably longer day, the first thaw — these small markers matter more here than they do somewhere with less dramatic seasons. Especially Ecuador, my home country, where there is no such thing as seasons, but the same weather throughout the year. And, if you want to experience a different weather you can just travel to the different region within the country.
The hidden femininity behind the nature cycles
There’s a tendency to treat winter dark as purely a mental health hazard to manage — light therapy, vitamin D, all the standard advice, which is genuinely useful and worth doing. But it’s worth also treating this season as one with something to offer, not just something to endure. Quiet. Stillness. An excuse to slow down that summer never gives us.
Our feminine bodies mirror Mother Nature this way. Especially here, in the Last Frontier, where every season asks us to lean in rather than resist it. Our femininity moves with the rhythm of the moon — cycling through phases roughly twelve times a year, echoing the seasons themselves: winter as our menstrual phase, spring as follicular, summer as ovulation, fall as luteal.
Each phase carries its own sensations, moods, energy, and wisdom. When we pay close attention, we start to hear our intuition more clearly — learning exactly what our body is asking for in that moment.
Several books explore these feminine archetypes and how they map onto each phase, teaching us to move through them with more ease by reconnecting with older, quieter forms of knowing. It comes back to a simple truth: the womb itself is dark, moist, and still.
So let’s welcome the slower, quieter, darker months ahead — the womb of the year. Let’s embrace winter in the Last Frontier.
Lets enjoy the upcoming slower, quieter and darker months. The womb of the year. Embrace the winter of The Last Frontier.
From Alaska with Love, GS.
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